Job #1: Babysitting

My first job was babysitting. I was 11, or 12, and I babysat for a family of three young girls who lived down the street.

My first job was babysitting. I was 11, or 12, and I babysat for a family of three young girls who lived down the street.

The eldest of the three girls was my sister’s age, about 6 or 7. She had a long dust-brown bob and an annoying voice, which probably only grated because of the way she let it drag on, croaking as she finished asking foolish questions.

The other two sisters were four and one, respectively. The middle child was a shriveled Shrinky Dink of her older sister; same knobby knees and mucousy, low voice, same blunt grey-brown bob, same tiny teeth stained from a diet of Kool-Aid and macaroni and cheese. The baby of the family was, well, a baby, big and bald and wordless, forever dressed in something white and frilly and faintly stained, a symbol of her gender assignment and the legacy of her older sisters’ messy eating habits.

Their home was filthy in a managed way, sticky everywhere but reasonably organized. In my experience this is typical of working class suburban families. Even now, when I visit the home of a young, dual-income family and find it spotless and well-appointed, with clean leather furniture and smart, jewel-toned Pinterest creations lining the walls, I am dismayed. I feel a huge class line cleaving these together, settled people off from me and my childhood and the childhood of my friends. I know I will never have both a baby and a crumb-free coffee table. I might not ever achieve either. I might not even care.

— — –

I remember the girls’ home as reminiscent of my own, just a bit darker and smellier. It was darker because it lacked the massive street-facing windows my childhood home had, and it was only smellier because I wasn’t a member of their family. To them, I’m sure the home had no smell, just as I would have declared the smell-less-ness of mine.

I remember that I stepped into the kitchen from the patio, and that the baby saw me and immediately started crying. She knew in an instinctual, pre-linguistic way what the presence of a preadolescent girl meant for her night. I felt ashamed, like it was my fault that the baby was upset, that she wouldn’t have reacted that way if I’d only been more welcoming or maternal.

The mother shoved a pink sippy cup full of milk into the baby’s hands and tipped its spigot back into her mouth, then floated into the living room to check on her older daughters. As she went, she gathered up an old leather purse, a rain jacket, her keys, and a pair of white, practical tennis shoes. She told her older daughters, who were sprawled in front of the television, that I would be watching them for a few hours. Hustling but not frantic, she looked to me and told me where to locate diapers, spoons, towels, food, essential phone numbers, and how to operate the television remote.

I had not planned on changing diapers. Feeding the older girls was a responsibility I hadn’t even anticipated. The full extent of my prior babysitting experience was a few hours staring into the eyes of baby cousins, with my mom and aunt chatting a few feet away. I was not prepared to be responsible for three little lives. And to manage those lives well, with meals, snacks, diaper changes and appropriate play activities? I was unprepared and unwilling. I tried to hide this from the mother, but it would eventually become obvious.

— — -

I didn’t even understand, at the time, why I’d been asked to babysit. I suppose I just checked off a few requisite boxes: tweenaged girl. Neighbor. Older sister. That I fell into all these categories was the reason that the baby teared up at the sight of me. Those categories were the sole heuristics the mother used in selecting her sitters. It was what all moms did.

This was back in 1999 or so, and lower middle-class families in the suburban Midwest did not hire nannies or pay for certified, adult sitters. And young adults were entrusted with a great deal more responsibility back then; we all worked and drove cars and went hours without checking in. Besides, qualified, semi-professional sitters were nearly unheard of in my little community at the time, and were certainly beyond everyone’s means. For my trouble I was probably paid $5 an hour, and I had no thought of complaining. I had no training in CPR or First Aid or anything else, and the mother didn’t think to worry about it.

— — -

The daughters sat on the gloomy, grey carpet before the TV while their mother arranged herself. She had a super-short, dark brown hair cut, and she wore high-waisted jeans and wire-rimmed glasses. She resembled a nerdier, more mundane version of Demi Moore’s character in the film Ghost. I found the tired, neutral expression her face always wore to be intimately depressing. She was never unpleasant to me; she just seemed to lack the energy to be kind.

When the girls noticed me standing in the doorway with their mother, they stood up and started bouncing and buzzing around the living room. They yelled and climbed atop the ottoman and fought. Their mother yelled in an exasperated way for them to stop. Then she turned back into the kitchen and released the silently crying baby from the high chair.

The baby was passed into my hands. She was sausagey and sweaty and cried in a muffled way, like a damaged squeak toy. The mother told me the baby had been fed and changed recently; I decided I would not be doing neither feeding nor changing, then, no matter what.

The mother rubbed the baby’s head affectionately and spoke in a soft voice that was sweeter than I expected. She told me she would be back later. She left. The girls were a whirlwind of fighting and screaming in the other room.

— — –

I have never been good with children. I cannot command authority over them, or do anything to assure them that I am wise or safe. I don’t know how to communicate in a manner that they can understand or find interesting, not without careening into graphic honesty, grotesque gross-out humor, and swearing. Around children I fumble with my words, and my voice quavers, and I lose all respect in a matter of seconds. All of this was even worse when I was a child myself.

The girls ran around a lot. They climbed the backs of couches and bookshelves and hurled themselves through the air and into one another’s tiny, bony bodies. If I tried to get in the way to stop the fighting or peel them off the furniture, I’d be struck too. Instead, I ran about, up and down the living room, yelling for them to calm down and becoming exasperated, while they jumped and squealed.

Their fighting was chaotic, and shifting, and about nothing at all, so I couldn’t settle it. One moment they’d be thrashing on the floor, in conflict over a doll or stuffed animal; a second later the grappling would break apart, and reform atop the couch, where they jumped and slapped and insulted. At some point the remote was thrown and it struck me in the shin. I screamed and they went quiet, for just an instant, then jumped up and down, holding hands and shrieking, unified for a moment in their celebration.

A bowl of spaghetti had fallen on the floor, and its spilled contents slowly cooled and congealed into the carpet. I noticed and went to clean it up. As I fetched paper towels in the kitchen, the middle daughter was struck the elder one in the arm with something hard, and a red mark began to form. The baby shuffled around the fray, giggling and keeping to herself.

— — –

I tried to calm them with TV, but it didn’t work. They’d had enough TV; my frustration was their latest toy. Soon I didn’t even try to stop their fighting. It was useless. Instead I became a referee, watching and mediating only when necessary. I told them to stay away from the knick-knacks and not to throw anything.

It was less than an hour in. I felt powerless, lost. While the girls screamed and pulled one another’s hair, I turned away and zoned out, directing my attention to the family portrait sitting on the living room mantle. There were the daughters, bobbed and yellow-toothed, and the baby with her inscrutable, turtleish expression, and the mom with her super-short haircut and the dad — wait, there was a dad?

He sat in the back left of the portrait, a broad hand on his wife’s shoulder. I’d lived down the street for the past 7 years, and not once had I seen the dad. I looked into his beady blue eyes and contemplated his fluffy brown hair. He was utterly unfamiliar. The mother hadn’t even mention him. It completely baffled me. I continued to live in that neighborhood until I was 18, and I never did see him, and I seldom heard him mentioned.

— — –

At some point, the baby wandered away from her fighting sisters and her apathetic, entranced babysitter, and found herself in the laundry room, beside the cat box. I followed her there, a few moments later. She was poking at cat turds with the wide end of the scooper.

“Kitty!” she burbled, pointing at the calcified feces, lying half-buried in a pile of scent crystals.

“Yes, Kitty!” I echoed. Then I heard the middle daughter scream and the older daughter claim she’d been bitten, so I left the baby there by the litter box and walked out into the den.

The middle daughter’s face was red and furious. An accusation flew out of her spit-riddled, inarticulate little mouth: something about being struck in the face with a doll. Her elder sister was curled up on the couch, knees pressed to her chest, brandishing a hand with a perfect half-moon of teeth marks.

I grabbed ice for the eldest daughter’s hand and took the doll away. I put it up on a shelf too high for either of them to reach. “No weapons except pillows,” I told them.

Soon they were brandishing couch cushions like riot shields and dashing at each other head-on at full speed. I moved the end tables and the ottoman out of the way and told them to be careful. There didn’t seem to be much else I could do.

— — –

The baby was content to stand in the laundry room, sifting through cat litter with the plastic scooper, withdrawing hard turds and dropping them into the wastepaper basket. To me, this seemed like a productive and virtuous use of her time. I helped show her how to drag the scooper at the proper angle, and how to strike it against the sides of the box, to shake excess litter free. Whenever she dropped a solid, sizeable poop into the trash, I patted her on the back and thanked her for helping. I used a sweet voice, a voice for good babies, just like the mother had.

“Kit-tee!” she said, pleased to be of service.

“Yes,” I said, “Kitty! Hey look, there’s another poop over there, to the right!”

And I left her like that, for most of the night, while her elder siblings raged and beat each other. Every few minutes I’d check in, to make sure she was fine. There she would be, bent over the litter, face stern with concentration, voice lilting with the excitement of having found a purpose. I was proud of her for being better-behaved than her sisters, and in an odd way, proud of myself.

— — –

When the mother called me late the next night, outraged at what had happened, I didn’t have the foresight to lie.

“Did you let [baby] play in the cat litter?” she asked, audibly miffed, while the TV droned on behind her.

“Yeah, she wanted to help out,” I said. It still didn’t seem like a bad thing to do.

“She could have gotten very sick,” the mother told me. “It’s not sanitary. I’m sorry, but I just can’t trust your judgment. I can’t have you coming back and watching my girls if that’s how your judgment is. Do you understand?”

There was pained disapproval in her voice that seemed disproportionate to the act. Nobody ever told me that babies weren’t allowed to dig around in the cat box. I let her hang on the line for a moment, not answering.

“Erika?” she said. “Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. I looked across the room. My family was watching Unsolved Mysteries.

“Do you understand that letting the baby play in the cat litter was inappropriate? She could have gotten sick!”

“Yeah,” I said. “I made a mistake and I understand if you don’t want me to watch your children again.” My voice came out stilted, faux-mature. I topped it off with a phonily regretful, low-toned, “I’m sorry, good-bye,” and then hung the phone up.

I had never before felt such relief.

Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.